UKRAINIAN church leaders have called on the international community to continue standing by their country, as President Trump prepared to discuss a peace deal with President Putin.
“Ukraine has been closely following negotiations at the highest world level to end this cruel, bloody, sacrilegious war,” the Greek Catholic Primate in Ukraine, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said on Sunday.
“We are asking God and world leaders for a just peace — for victims to be honoured in their suffering, and for the aggressor to pay for this tragedy. The criminal and his victim cannot be put on the same level.”
The Archbishop made the appeal before bilateral talks begin on Friday in Alaska. They are expected to include territory handovers as a condition to ending the three-year war.
He said that Ukrainians continued to “protect the peace of Europe and the world with their breasts”, and would continue “doing everything” to prevent the Russian army’s “murderous hand” from “removing their right to exist”.
Meanwhile, the Primate of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church urged his countrymen — “no matter now difficult the external circumstances” — to maintain their trust in God.
“We find ourselves in circumstances similar to the Apostles aboard their boat. It seems that God has withdrawn from us, that we are abandoned in solitude among stormy waves,” Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko) said on Monday in a post on social media.
“At such moments, we should again look ahead with the eyes of faith, seeing Christ coming towards us. . . Though the darkness of evil seems to have gathered around Ukraine, as stormy waves threaten to drown us, we must believe we are not abandoned.”
The Russian President was expected to make far-reaching demands — including the restoration of Russian jurisdiction over Ukraine’s Orthodox Church — at the Alaskan summit, his first with President Trump under the latter’s second presidency.
This was ruled out on Monday, however, by a senior Ukrainian state official, Viktor Yelensky, who heads Ukraine’s State Service for Freedom of Conscience. He said that the Russian Church would remain banned, because it had “inspired and directly participated in the murder of Ukrainians”.
He said that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, headed by Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky), had been given until 18 August to prove that it had severed ties with Moscow, subject to five conditions. It would then be free to “organise its existence, including canonically, in the most optimal way”.
“Rumours have been circulating that the Ukrainian state intends to demand that the UOC renounces Orthodoxy, switches to a new calendar and becomes part of another Church,” Mr Yelensky told Radio Kultura.
“In fact, the order requires the UOC to withdraw from the Russian Orthodox Church — nothing more. And this caused some misunderstanding among many church figures, who were fed myths that we supposedly wanted to destroy them.”
In a national address on Monday, President Zelensky said that there was “no indication whatsoever” that President Putin was considering a ceasefire after his talks with President Trump. Current force redeployments suggested Russia was in fact preparing “new offensive operations”.
European Union leaders warned in a statement on Tuesday that a “just and lasting peace” must respect “the principles of independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”, and that no peace deal would be “decided without Ukraine”.